Blog

Thoughts on entrepreneurship, startups, and tech.

I met someone last night at a meetup. He just got out of a corporate job and was weighing ideas and opportunities. Becoming an entrepreneur was unquestionably something that was tickling him. He explained his concept in great detail (which was quite impressive) and even brought up the pros and the cons. But he was stuck. He didn't want to start.

Who hasn't used a messaging app. They're extremely practical because it's not always appropriate to voice call someone. And also, because of the sheer number and variety of features they contain. Messaging (data) apps hold our future because they integrate increasingly compelling features tied around one simple core concept - private one2one communication.

More bad news about Facebook. It was once every month, then a week, now every day. Why are we only hearing about it now? Things like we're hearing don't just happen. Given the complexity of the tasks, processes, and data sets because of the sheer size of the platform(s), takes time, effort and some serious talent & teamwork.

We all have images of shop employees not looking up from their Instagram accounts when we walk into stores, but today's economy is no playground and the majority of small businesses have their arms full of urgencies and daily obligations. So how is it that RetailTech startups/companies don't grasp this reality?

There’s no shortage of debate around artificial intelligence (AI) today and it has filtered through to practically every medium in society making it one of the primary discussions in society alongside politics, sex, war (terrorism), health and ecology.

Have you ever taken a Fitness Gram / Cooper Pacer Test? It’s a program that is used by sports coaches and trainers to estimate an athlete’s VO2 max that is one of the dominants of endurance sports performance criteria. It is also comprehensively only one facet of athletic performance and thus should be kept in perspective. The same rationale should be applied to sales quotas — they’re just one “pea in the pod” of sales performance.

In the word fundraising, there’s the word “raising” and that’s essential to understand why it’s not an easy task to accomplish. When you’re asking someone for funds you’re implicitly raising their hopes for some sort outcome and more often than not, a return.

Remember the days when companies scrambled to keep you as a customer, albeit making sometimes obscure and timid propositions, but whenever things went down to the line, they would make sure you stayed. Well, nowadays it looks like the most recent customer always wins.

In most progressive mobility cities today you can find a plethora of shared services ranging from public transport, cars, ride-sharing, bikes, and scooters which is great step forward, yet you still can’t seamlessly enjoy these alternatives because they are almost always powered by proprietary assets & technology.

We have such an intimate relationship with email, probably because for a lot of us, it was our first experience with the Internet. Rare are the innovations in this space that is so tightly intertwined in one of our fundamental means of communication that the arrival of something novel in this space merits our most in-depth attention.

We’ve heard it all too often, “You are the most important person in our company and we will always do our utmost best to satisfy you…”. It’s become like what was implied in Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, something we are no longer sensitive to and even more, that we no longer believe in. Whatever your viewpoint is, customer support has been supplanted by price, trend and status in today’s hyper-consumption lifestyle.

A lot of startups I work with struggle to squeeze into their app or website, as many features as they can. I don’t blame them for trying, it’s an honest endeavour but the result is most often the opposite of the intent. Feature overload.

There’s a common belief in the internet industry that when your service or product is not performing, you need to “pivot”, changing your course of direction to pursue a new and fundamentally different objective. Not a day goes by without an announce on popular websites and specialist blogs that some up & coming startup has “pivoted” because they have found their new gold lying under some stone on the side of their current route.

Your daily choice of clothing is mechanical yet over time, we all tend to become unsatisfied with our wardrobe and want change. Popular fashion brands are probably the most influential component of our ever-changing dress trends, they manage the incomprehensible feat of influencing people to replace perfectly good clothes with others that are practically identical. Can this seemingly unstoppable force be transposed elsewhere?

When I’m out & about and run into street musicians, one thing always comes to mind; was it their raw skill that made me stop and listen or the emotion they conveyed to everyone around them. It’s these types of people who can bring and help build an inestimable ‘purpose’ in your startup because they’re able to readily connect with people.

Business has been perpetuated since ancient Rome and some of the earliest chartered corporations that were founded in the 1600's are still around today. The equation for business to exist is pretty straightforward “where goods and services are exchanged for one another or for money” and that remains the same now.

I think it’s become “trendy” to talk from the hip with customers in the digital economy. And I don’t think it’s the right way to do long term sustainable business. Disrespect, lightness & irony lead to shallow relationships, infidelity & ignorance which inevitably finishes up by destroying any brand reputation you might have had and punishing sales. All because of “form”.